alt Hacker NewsThis is obviously not an attempt at anything remotely resembling documentary history. It’s more of a just so story explaining what problem each step solved.
Unless of course one thinks that smooth gray stones from a riverbed two miles away reflects some historically significant point in money’s evolution.
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The problem is the story is wrong, and that leads to misunderstandings of what money is and how economic institutions arose in fact vs mythology.
For starters, debt records came before money basically everywhere we have evidence for the invention of money.
i would very strongly suggest reading David Graeber. It completely revolutionized my understanding of how human social and economic institutions emerge and evolve in actual fact vs imagined myth.
We can just tell the real story, it's far more interesting and useful than the myth.
I'm not going to explain David Graeber's Debt to you, but yes, this exact 18th century fantasy of the emergence of money in caveman times contains the same kind of misunderstandings that also leads to most people having an incredibly misguided view of how the contemporary global financial system operates.